Crucial Partners: the Volatile and Indispensable U.S.-India Linkage

**Mike Green** (0:00)
Welcome to The Asia Chessboard, the podcast that examines geopolitical dynamics in Asia and takes an inside look at the making of grand strategy. I'm Mike Green of the United States Studies Centre in Sydney and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Welcome back to The Asia Chessboard. I'm Mike Green. We're going to focus in this episode on India, the US-India relationship, India's strategic play on the chessboard, and what the heck is happening between Donald Trump and Narendra Modi. We could not be better served in that mission than by having Dr. Tanvi Madan, Senior Fellow in the Center for Asia Policy Studies at Brookings in Washington DC, one of the leading experts on India in a political, but especially a strategic context. Lots to discuss, Tanvi. Thanks for joining.

**Tanvi Madan** (0:55)
Thanks, Mike. I've been a long-time listener, and I'm really glad to be on the show.

**Mike Green** (0:59)
So we do this thing, which I think people are interested in, where we sort of tell your origin story. How did you get into this? I understand you were going up into Delhi on a trajectory that would have made you a tech, whatever, a tech-cis, technology billionaire. You could have funded Brookings, but something happened. Tell us what happened.

**Tanvi Madan** (1:19)
The road not taken. I grew up in India in New Delhi in the 1980s, in a bit like DC. It's a very political city and you can't escape that. It's a bit of a bigger one-horse-down. This was especially as the 80s went on and into the 90s. This was just everywhere in the world. So many changes on the international scene. I used to read a lot. We used to do those things in those days, like read newspapers and magazines. There was this one show, there was state-run TV in India, so just the one channel. But every week, there was to be the show called on Friday, called The World This Week, and it was my favorite TV show. Because for me, just watching not just what was happening, whether it was in Europe, whether in India's case, the Middle East and what was happening there in the early 90s, in particular, it was very impactful. The fact that not only was momentous changes happening in the world, but that they directly were affecting India, but not just India in terms of foreign policy. For me, and for my family and friends, it was changing India as an economy and society. India had to open up after the Soviet Union collapsed, after the first Gulf War, and that directly impacted my life. I like traveling and that added to it as well, but I was always interested in international relations and also how it could change countries and how countries themselves reacted to world changes.

**Mike Green** (2:47)
Yeah, I grew up in DC inside the Beltway, so we have similar addictions because my old Boy Scout troop, Troop 52, you'd go camping and one scout master would be a federal judge, and the scout master would be a diplomat, and there's no escaping it is there. But you went further away than I did. You went to school at Yale and then undergrad school in the US?

**Tanvi Madan** (3:06)
That's right.
I did my undergraduate at a college in Delhi called Lady Sriram, and they were very good. I was a history major and they actually made you read and study and analyze, and there were some great professors there. So I got the history bug, and then that was my little Texas. I did about a year and a half with Delhi and Bangalore, taught myself how to code, but then ended up applying to the Yale IR program for my masters. Had a great experience there because it was also a very interdisciplinary program, political scientists, historians, but they used to let us take classes in the business school as well. So just a really interesting way of looking at the world. Then was at Brookings for three years at a research assistant, working for Jim Steinberg and Steve Cohen, who worked on South Asia, then decided needed to go get a PhD, wanted to go get a PhD, and did that in public policy at UT Austin at the LBJ school there. I went in thinking I want to relook at the history of US-India relations and what drove it, and stumbled upon the fact that way back in the, even in the 1960s and 50s, China was a driving factor in both good and bad ways. So I decided to look into that, and since then, I've kind of looked at this India-China-US triangle a fair bit in my work, especially since I've been back at Brookings since 2012